Changing the Energy Metanarrative: How Maryland could do it

I go to clean energy conferences for two reasons. First, these events always have a metanarrative – that is, how industry executives and experts are framing key issues, using the latest bits of jargon or creative euphemism.

The second, and more important reason, is to network and find out what’s really happening on the ground, the micronarratives that focus on the people and stories often flying under the radar. 

The metanarrative at the recent Maryland Clean Energy Summit was a regional variation on the narratives I have been hearing at most of the industry conferences for the past year — data centers, demand growth, rising electric bills and President Trump’s war on clean energy. 

I’m going to talk about all that later, but I want to start with the micronarratives because the stories here fall into E/lectrify’s Cool News category, while also advancing some outside-the-box thinking on the meta.

The nonprofit Maryland Clean Energy Center sponsored the two-day conference, Oct. 14-15, at the Marriott Conference Center on the University of Maryland campus in College Park.  

I was blown away by a panel on green building where Francesca Oliveira, a technical principal for the international architectural firm HOK, said that one of the biggest obstacles to the spread of net-zero buildings is the industry’s long-held belief that they are too expensive. 

Change is first a matter of mind set, Oliveira said. “Having [a] low-carbon, a net-zero building, this does not cost more money, 

“You have to think about it a different way when you’re designing,” she said. “Right from the beginning, it starts by setting the right performance goals early, having full commitment from the team, whether it’s the owner, the consulting team, the contractors.”

The advice from Scott Kelly, principal at Re:Vision Architecture, was more to the point. “Don’t ask for permission to do this stuff,” he said. “Just do it. It’s your responsibility.”

All the architects on the panel had cool projects to show off, like Re:Vision’s Fahy Commons at Muhlenberg College in Allentown, Pa., a multipurpose building — offices and classrooms — with an impressive list of green building certifications and awards.

Kelly explained that all the offices were on the north side of the building and had somewhat smaller windows to provide “an appropriate amount of daylight,” while preventing overheating from too much “daylight to space.” Less overheating means less air conditioning is needed.

Michael Hindle, the principal of Passive to Positive, spoke of his commitment to “new carbon architecture, which [uses] bio-based materials and mineral materials that draw carbon out of the atmosphere. … Every year, your building becomes a climate change-fighting machine, not just less of a contributor.”  

Thinking differently and not asking permission kind of became the conference buzz for me, the subtext that framed the micro- and metanarratives at a series of sessions and keynotes. 

I didn’t know a lot about Howard County, located west of Baltimore, until I heard Tim Lattimer, administrator of community sustainability, talk about how the county has used a power purchase agreement to put about 35 MW of solar on a range of public and private sites.

Speaking at a panel on distributed energy resources, Lattimer, reported that solar projects under that PPA now generate over half of the power needed for local government operations. Savings over the 25-year life of the agreement are estimated at $30 million.

“Distributed energy resources,” or DERs, is an umbrella term covering a range of clean technologies, from solar to electric vehicle chargers, installed on a utility’s local grid. PPAs are contracts that allow a range of public and private organizations to buy power from a solar project built by a third-party developer, without having to spend a lot of money upfront. 

Combining the two, Lattimer said, has allowed Howard to increase solar in the county by 23% in the past year alone. Total solar now tops out at about 150 MW, including the 35 MW from the PPA.

“Our aim for 2030 is 437 MW, and by 2045, we want to have over 1,100 MW of solar in Howard County,” he said.

Profiled at the green building panel, the county’s courthouse was designed by HOK and built to LEED Gold standards. An onsite solar installation, one of the first projects completed under the PPA, provides 50% of the building’s power. 

Lattimer is something of a story himself. A veteran of the U.S. State Department, who worked on climate policy with former Secretary of State John Kerry, he is now bringing that same level of vision and commitment to local government. 

He sees solar and other DERs as a way for counties like Howard to provide reliable, affordable power to their homes and businesses, while cutting their dependence on an “antiquated grid system and the vulnerabilities that that presents us.

“Moving toward DERs and having as much of our own indigenous energy generation capacity as a community [will] liberate ourselves from that dependence,” he said. “Our ability to have clean energy systems online and … to even harness them as virtual power plants would be advantageous to local communities.” 

Northwest of Howard, Frederick County is developing its own DER project, a municipal microgrid, with 2 MW each of solar and storage. Speaking at a microgrid panel, Shannon Moore, the county’s director of energy and environment, recalled how she was asked if she could turn a 200,000-square-foot former bank and computer center into a net-zero building.

 “I said yes before I really knew what I was doing,” Moore said.

Working with a range of partners, the county is now mid-design on the microgrid, which will power the county’s 9-1-1 center, its emergency operations center and its own data center, along with other county services, all to be located in the greened-up building. 

The goal is to keep Frederick’s critical services up and running in the event of an extreme-weather event or other power outage and provide a resource hub for the community.. 

A $1.2 million grant for the project – from the Federal Emergency Management Agency – was recently unfrozen, Moore reported, and the county is also getting state funding for the project. 

The Maryland Energy Administration wants more cities and counties to upgrade and electrify their buildings and has $50 million in grants to help via its Local Government Energy Management program, aka L-GEM. 

The MEA is also supporting DERs with $17 million in incentives for community solar projects that cut electric bills 25% for low- and moderate-income households. 

Now this is where we get into metanarrative. Maryland has very ambitious climate and clean energy policies. The Climate Solutions Now Act of 2022 set greenhouse gas reduction emission targets for the state of 60% by 2031 and net-zero by 2045.

Gov. Wes Moore doubled down on those goals with a 2024 executive order calling for the state to develop a clean energy standard that would “achieve 100% clean energy in Maryland by 2035.”

At the same time, the state is dependent on the regional grid operator, PJM Interconnection, for about 40% of its power, and PJM’s generation mix is more than 75% coal, gas and nuclear. Solar and wind make up only about 18% of the power on the regional system.

Maryland and the other PJM states, plus the District of Columbia, are now bearing the brunt – and rising utility bills – resulting in part from the explosion in demand growth on the regional system, primarily due to the hundreds of data centers in Northern Virginia.

A key session at the conference (see picture above) centered on whether Maryland needs an energy master plan, as opposed to the comprehensive emission reduction plan the state issued in 2023.  Abe Silverman, a researcher at the Ralph O’Connor Sustainable Energy Institute at Johns Hopkins University, said the current rate increases in Maryland and other states are just the beginning.

“It's only going to get worse over the next couple of years,” he said.

But the speed and scale of demand growth — from data centers, manufacturing and electrification — mean “the past is not necessarily prologue,” Silverman said. “A good energy master plan, or good energy initiative, really requires all of us … to sit down and talk, come up with a bunch of scenarios and then start doing analysis that is useful, even if it's not necessarily going to be correct.” 

At least one of those scenarios needs to consider what might be possible with policies that drive change from the bottom up, where DERs and local innovation can provide cost-savings for consumers and communities, and flexibility for the grid. These local systems are already emerging, in Howard and Frederick counties and across the country, potentially creating a foundation for the dynamic, digital grid we need now. 

In recent months, PJM has issued a series of dire warnings — rolling blackouts in Maryland by 2027 — and launched various initiatives for jumping natural gas and nuclear plants to the front of its notoriously backed-up queue of mostly solar and storage projects waiting to get online.

We need a new metanarrative. Answering today’s challenges with old solutions will not work. We must think differently and not ask permission. It is our responsibility.